I think people get very angry about dropshipping because there is this self-help industry around it...but what that really reflects is that platforms for acquiring customers have totally changed: costs are nothing, you don't need huge scale to contact customers, etc.

But it is a legitimate business model, people have been dropshipping for decades (shock: most Asian manufacturers have little to no interest in working out how to market to Western consumers), and you can make billions doing this if you want - Wayfair is a dropshipper, Wish is a dropshipper, you can do this if you want.

I'm working on an e-commerce automation platform called Openship and one of our first users wasn't even into dropshipping. She sold her own brand coffee but wanted to sell coffee accessories like french presses, grinders, etc. Her buyers would get these add-ons with the coffee. She would ship the coffee and dropship the other items. Those add-ons would cover her ad costs and she eventually private labelled those items too. That is how you effectively use dropshipping to test and build out your catalog.

Aren’t restaurants calling DoorDash and GrubHub out over exactly this “ghost kitchen” practice though?

Parent was referring to DoorDash pretending to be affiliated with the real restaurant you but from. That's not really dropshipping.

Dropshipping would be setting up a ghost kitchen storefront but not even having a kitchen, just redirecting orders to Chile's or whatever.